“Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” – Matthew 10:39 (NIV)

Isn’t it odd to think we’d lose our life if we found it? But that’s not so.
No, instead we are called to lose our life. This doesn’t mean dying for Christ – though in some cases people do lose their life for believing and following Christ – think of the Church in Asia and elsewhere. I think it means we need to lose our life in the way that we die to the ways of the world we live in; die to the society that so often tells us how to dress, act, look and even love. Die to the world’s twisted definition of love. Die to the comfort of our life as a rich American. Die to the broken world that calls us and says, “This is home. This is how it should be.” This world may be our home, but only for a short period of time; we are a people who move around, never staying in one place, as Katie Davis, author of Kisses from Katie, puts it, “I am somewhat of a nomad on this earth. Human beings long for a place to call home, a nest, a sanctuary of their own. I have many and none… But God whispers to me that I really have only one home, and that is with Him,” (128).

When we lose our life; our life in this lost world, then we find our life in our Savior, for how can we strive to follow our Father’s footsteps when we don’t even have an understanding of how he instructs us to truly live? We wouldn’t of ever been able to find life in Christ had it not been for Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. Jesus was dead to the world, he turned his back on society’s rules and blazed his own trail. He was a rebel, he was an essential outcast, he was radical.

Refering back to the persecuted church, I recently read a book called Tortured for Christ by Richard Wurmbrand, and in the book he tells of his life as a Christian living in the Soviet Union, giving his own story along with others. He tells of how they were tortured by being burnt, starved, placed in freezing conditions that they when they were on the brink of death, that’s when the officers would pull them out and warm them up a little. They would beat them, whip them; it is unimaginable to us. The Soviet officers were trying to get them to renounce their faith. They had zero success. The tortured knew what it was like to die in the worldly way, they knew how what it was really like to know Christ. It’s in the situations of persecution, trials, hardship, and materialistic poverty that people have the strongest faith. They have died to their life and found life in Christ. They have picked up their crosses and followed Christ.

We have to ask ourselves, a people who have not really known what it is like to live in poverty, be tortured, or lose everything, the question, “Are we truly able to die to our life of comfort, pick up our cross and truly follow Him?”

“It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; and the glory of a king (or queen) to search it out.”

–Proverbs 25:2

When I was little and got super upset, instead of running to my parents, I would run and hide from them. I wanted them to come find me. I wanted them to come search me out, show much they cared and comfort me. They knew I needed them, but them coming to comfort me showed that they also needed and loved me. That is what this verse is all about. God wants us to seek after Him. Show Him how much we need/Love him.